by Mario Bolduc
Valéria believed the only way to stop this heinous business was to go after the traffickers, the intermediaries between victims and witch doctors who passed on amulets and other good-luck charms to their clients. The business could be halted only if a clear message was sent to traffickers and everyone else implicated in the racket: the death penalty would be reinstated for anyone, no matter their degree of involvement, even if they had never touched a machete, who was found responsible for the death of an albino.
At first Lugembe thought twice about recommending such extreme measures to his government. Eliminating one barbarous custom and replacing it with a barbarous state response might not be the best solution. The Americans defended the action. But the Komba government didn’t want to be discredited in European eyes by reinstating capital punishment. Komba himself had suspended it in 1996 and had pursued the image of a modern, open-minded leader in the tradition of Nyerere, his mentor.
Valéria made several trips to Dodoma and Dar es Salaam to try to convince Lugembe that her arguments were right. Of course, the death penalty was an abhorent form of punishment, but they were facing a horrific problem, and it was pure delusion to think it could be solved with today’s milder measures.
Besides, weren’t witch doctors and other so-called healers running a veritable dictatorship over superstitious, poor, illiterate peasants? They were a mafia with their hands in everything, including the central government. How many lopped-off fingers, toes, and earlobes, dried and shrivelled, were hidden deep in the desk drawers of bureaucrats?
As minister of home affairs, Lugembe increased the number of policemen and border guards, stiffened fines and prison sentences. The business became riskier, healers had to be more careful, they slipped deeper into clandestine circles, yet their activities continued unabated.
The efforts were well meaning but made little difference. In the Kagera region, albinos lived in perpetual fear. Parents kept their children at home instead of sending them to school, depriving them of an education and sentencing them to a life of poverty. The streets were dangerous, terrifying even, a cutthroat atmosphere. Valéria invited an albino boy to come to the capital with her to tell the story of a childhood marked by terror. When he walked through his village, he felt all eyes upon him, eyes that coveted him. He had dodged death more than once. Even today, whenever he left his house, it was with fear and reticence.
Lugembe was moved. Valéria knew he spent good money protecting his adopted daughter who never went out without a bodyguard, even if albino hunting was essentially a rural phenomenon. Every day Clara was escorted to the University of Dodoma where she studied computer science. She was lucky compared to albinos in the countryside who were defenceless, at the mercy of some madman who was greedier than the rest.
Then everything changed.
In September 2002, despite efforts to protect her, Clara was kidnapped as her twin sister had been seventeen years earlier. President Komba finally gave in to Valéria’s arguments.
Arrested and found guilty, Samuel Musindo was sentenced and executed, even if his lawyer, Jason Chagula, used every recourse to lessen the punishment that he considered excessive.
Valéria had two groups of enemies very different from each other. The witch doctors and healers, since her actions interfered with their business. And right-thinking people in the West, believers in the politically correct, who condemned her, a lawyer herself, for her “reactionary” ideas.
As the truck entered the town of Bukoba, honking its way through the gawking passersby, Kilonzo turned to Max. “You tried to reach Sophie Stroner several times. We checked the messages on her cellphone.”
Shortly after Kilonzo’s call to Zanzibar, Max had left a message with Vincent Kalitumba, manager of the Dar es Salaam branch of the Bank of Baroda. Had Valéria picked up the million dollars that had once belonged to Jonathan Harris, and that he’d deposited in her account? He was still waiting for an answer.
“Well?” Kilonzo asked. “Sophie Stroner?”
Max had no intention of disclosing anything about that subject, nor even Sophie’s recent trip to Lamu. Kilonzo didn’t mention it, which meant he knew nothing. He was in the dark about why Sophie might have come to see him.
“I wanted to see Valéria again.”
“See her again?”
“Personal reasons.”
Kilonzo waited.
“She and I had a love affair. It ended badly. That’s why I stayed in Africa. I still hoped that —”
“And you wanted Sophie to be the go-between?”
“Yes.”
Kilonzo looked away, then returned with a question. “How did you meet Valéria Michieka?”
Max paused. He had to choose among the memories he could tell a policeman and the rest he didn’t want to share with anyone. First, he had to hide the way they’d met in October 2006. He was passing through Toronto, where he was plotting a fraud to be carried out against a high-ranking member of the municipal administration. He had set up headquarters in the Sheraton Centre. His stay in the city would be brief. Once the operation began, Max would take the first plane to New York the next morning. As he was paying his hotel bill, he noticed a tall black woman in conversation with the concierge about a problem with the lights or the sound in a meeting room; he couldn’t remember which. “It can’t happen again, not like the last time,” she insisted. The concierge nodded and promised it wouldn’t on his mother’s grave.
What was it that drew him in? Her beauty, and her determination, too. She was in her forties, slender and elegant. She refused to give in to fashion and straighten her hair — she had something of the political activist Angela Davis about her. Max figured she must work in advertising or marketing with her well-cut clothes and bright colours. That evening she had a presentation for her clients. Her career was hanging in the balance, which justified the dressing-down she gave the hotel concierge.
Despite his attraction, Max saw a possible victim in her. Everything about her, the way she carried herself, the way she spoke to the hotel employee, it all pointed to an ambitious woman who had no doubt trampled on a few people on her road to the top. Max saw that as a weakness, this will to cling to the summit at any price after so many struggles to reach it. He might be able to take advantage, and as a con artist he never missed an opportunity to gather the crumbs that fell from the tables of the rich and the very rich. No doubt about it, this woman belonged to that exclusive club.
In the lobby, as Max was walking toward the elevators, their eyes met. That evening, curious, intrigued, he stopped by the second floor where the meeting rooms were.
He had been wrong about everything.
Valéria Michieka wasn’t in advertising. She was a lawyer who ran The Colour of Respect Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping albinos, as the brochure at the entrance to the room indicated. At the time Max knew nothing about the tragedy of these “white Africans” in certain areas of the continent.
He went into the room. Some fifty people were sitting on chairs in front of a long table. Mostly grey-haired, but a few up-and-coming types who seemed to be wasting their time. Has-beens and wannabes sent by their companies, the sign that they had little interest in Michieka’s group.
From a spot behind her computer, Valéria addressed the audience. The classic PowerPoint, loaded with statistics and shocking figures, embellished by photos of albino children. Some of them were handicapped. They were missing an arm or a leg. They leaned on crude crutches, their eyes magnified by thick glasses. A freak show, Max thought.
Valéria was soliciting funds to create a hospital devoted solely to albinos and their families, which was badly needed, according to her. The government was contributing, but not enough. At least that was what Max understood.
Interrupted by the door closing and the chair Max pulled up to sit on, Valéria glanced at the newcomer, then returned to her presentation. She spoke of her involvement and her mission — her entire life dedicated to the albinos of the Kage
ra region.
Max watched her discreetly and listened to the music of her voice. She charmed him, it was true. Valéria spoke with great conviction, but without overdoing it, describing the terrible situation of the albinos in plain, hard-hitting language. She didn’t weigh her presentation down with metaphors but went right to the point. Valéria needed money, and a lot of it, otherwise these unfortunate people would have no refuge and no place to seek treatment. Their skin diseases quickly became cancerous because their lack of pigment made them vulnerable to the sun’s rays, and their sight soon degenerated. Not to mention the abuse they were subject to. They rarely lived past the age of thirty. Those albinos spared by human traffickers fell victim to diseases they couldn’t afford to treat.
Slipping out before question period for fear someone would get interested in his presence, Max went up to his room. After a solitary dinner in the cavernous dining room, surrounded by tourists who stormed the buffet as if the end of the world were at hand, he took shelter in the lobby bar for a nightcap.
Leaning on the counter, he felt a female presence close by. He turned around. Valéria was standing there, looking him in the eye. She had probably been in the dining room, too, but he hadn’t spotted her.
“I don’t know what you’re after or who sent you, but I have my suspicions. Let me tell you something. I’m not easily intimidated.”
Max held her gaze. There was obviously some mistake. “You have the wrong person.”
“I saw you in the meeting room this evening. And in the lobby this afternoon. You’re trying to scare me, is that it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was curious, that’s all. Your presentation was very good.”
“You’re not from Amnesty International?”
“Unless someone signed me up without telling me.”
She relaxed, but only a little.
Max jumped in. “Robert Cheskin. Pleased to meet you.”
She seemed embarrassed, caught off guard. “I am sorry …”
Max invited her for a drink, and she accepted once she’d greeted some colleagues at another table, who were just getting up to leave. Valéria spoke at length about her involvement in the albino cause. About her foundation and the tour she was on in the hope of finding the funding she required. She’d reached out to Canada, the United States, and Europe, too. In magazines and scientific journals, the articles about her and her work had created a buzz.
“Charity has become an institution, Mr. Cheskin. It’s no longer just a matter of convincing the rich to contribute. These days they’re keen to give, but their generosity needs to be channelled to the right organizations.”
“And you’re all in competition.”
“Even in Africa. Every day is the same battle.”
Famines, epidemics, natural disasters — donors were subject to intense pressure.
“And albinos aren’t a prestige cause. Not yet.”
So she needed to travel the world to stand out from the crowd. To remind charitable souls that her foundation existed and was worthy. The harvest was meagre. Since she’d begun working to instate capital punishment for traffickers in Tanzania, right-thinking people had turned their backs on her cause. The same organization couldn’t try to save the lives of those unfortunate beings on one hand, and with the other, put to death criminals who were also human beings. When it came to crime, two wrongs didn’t make a right.
More and more often, her presentations were sabotaged by noisy and provocative hecklers, mostly from Amnesty International, which wasn’t about to let Michieka, the lawyer, off so easy.
That was her first thought: Max was one of those activists who had harassed her since she’d set foot in America.
Max and Valéria talked for hours, first in the hotel bar, then in one of the intimate salons after closing time.
“I’m sorry. I’m weighing you down with my troubles. You haven’t told me anything about yourself.”
Max wasn’t about to tell her anything. It would have all been lies, in any case. In the elevator, he pulled her close and kissed her. “Let’s forget about the victims of human madness,” he urged her, “and all the atrocities.”
She was in full agreement.
Upstairs in his room, they had sex. Ordered champagne. When morning dawned, Max was in love. He wanted to spend the day, the week, his whole life with her.
When she emerged from the bathroom wearing her professional outfit, she announced, “I have a plane to Montreal to catch in a couple of hours.”
She was heading out again to meet more investors and charm more donors. Convince them that her humanitarian work was important and worthy.
Then she would go home to Africa.
“Friday is Sophie’s birthday.”
Her daughter of twenty-three, who was studying at McGill University.
“When she was born, I made a vow. As long as I live, no matter where I am in this world, I’ll be with her on that day to hold her in my arms and wish her happy birthday.”
Max was confused. So there was a husband in the picture?
He had a name: Richard Stroner, a Canadian from Winnipeg. Tall, well built, a likeable face, judging from the photos he saw later in Valéria’s house. He was an engineer from Alcan sent to determine the value of the bauxite that might be extracted in Tanzania. There were legal problems to settle, permits to obtain, and Valéria was suggested as a resource; she had just opened her practice and was eager to meet potential clients. When he returned to Canada and his wife, Stroner couldn’t get her out of his mind. He engineered a quick divorce, it was urgent, and ran back to Tanzania to press his suit. Valéria was in love, too. Never again would they be separated. Ever.
In 1994 the Kagera region became the temporary home for Rwandan refugees who settled in makeshift camps thrown together in chaos. The United Nations gave Richard the responsibility of building the sanitation facilities for a number of these camps in collaboration with the Tanzanian government, which oversaw the work. That summer, as he was going from camp to camp, Richard lost his life in a car crash.
When she got over the initial shock and pain, after she cried herself dry, Valéria considered leaving the region and moving to Dar es Salaam where it would be easier to find work. In the end, she decided to stay put with Sophie, who was born in 1983. The albino cause occupied her full-time now, and Bukoba was the centre for the most zealous witch doctors and self-styled healers.
As time went by, Valéria’s reputation spread across the region and beyond, and Max doubted that the people of Bukoba had much use for her. They probably saw her as a fanatic who could have deserted this hole and gone to live comfortably in Dar es Salaam, but who insisted on living among them for the strange, egotistical pleasure of charity.
Max kissed her long, deeply, and passionately.
“Don’t ask anything of me,” she told him as she pulled away.
He knew very well what she meant. But he wasn’t about to obey her. “Can we see each other again?”
“Please, don’t ask.”
“I mean it.”
She looked away and headed for the door.
He thought he had lost her, so soon, but at the last moment she came back and kissed him.
In New York, Max slipped a cheque for one hundred thousand dollars into an envelope he had picked up in the conference room and sent it to the headquarters of The Colour of Respect Foundation, which was also Valéria’s house. A week later she called him from her office.
“Are you trying to buy me off, Mr. Cheskin?”
“I did it for the sake of humanity.” He already missed her crystal laughter.
“I’ll be in New York in December for a conference.”
“If you need a chauffeur …”
“That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”
6
According to Inspector Kilonzo, Valéria and her daughter had been attacked on Saturday evening by a thief. He used a machete to wound Valéria: blows to the shoulder and neck.
Sophie tried in vain to defend her. She, too, was killed by a machete. When the police came, they found the two women in a pool of blood. Their deaths were quick, with no excessive violence, or at least that was what the policeman said.
“Any witnesses?” asked Max as the vehicle moved down the road that led to Valéria’s lakeside house.
“No. But we’re still questioning the neighbours.”
“Did you find the weapon?”
“There’s a machete in nearly every house. This is the countryside, Mr. Cheskin.” Then he put on his bureaucrat’s voice. “According to our calculations, the crime occurred around eleven o’clock. Maybe midnight, but no later. This site is deserted. An assailant can slip onto the property without being seen.”
Max noted that the inspector seemed to know a whole lot about a crime that had just been committed, and for which not a single witness had yet come forward. An investigator who wasn’t from the region and whom everyone seemed to trust, or so he said. Quite astonishing.
Valéria and her daughter had added a wing for the office onto the original house, and that was where they received their clients. A section at the back, larger than the rest, served as a meeting room and storehouse. Stacks of files that the two lawyers had accumulated sat in piles.
